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I have been getting calls that immediately start with, "Thank you for choosing Marriot Hotels!" for a couple years now. The message goes on to say how I am getting this great offer because I am a valued customer. On a couple occasions, I stayed on the line to get a human, they ask yes/no questions (are you over 28? do you have a valid credit card?). I just replied with questions of my own, and they immediately hung up. I can continue to ignore the calls, but they are always from a random local number and I get nearly twice as many of these calls than I get legitimate calls.
I did a search and found this has been around for a while and Marriot is aware:
http://news.marriott.com/2015/05/marriott-international-responds-to-continued-phone-scam-updated-oct-20-2015/
I have deliberated about posting, but I don't see the FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] as being able to act unless I can provide them something more than the spoofed phone number. Providing the number(s) probably won't help as they are spoofing the caller ID. I know that this is a long shot, but is there anything anyone can suggest beyond creating a spreadsheet of phone numbers, dates, and times to log these calls? Would that even be useful?
It seems that something is fundamentally broken with the current phone system, if this spoofing is even possible. But that is a side topic here, the real question is, what can I do, if anything, to get the data the FCC would need to shut this down?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @02:30PM
Had a debt collector on me for a few years. They would call, refuse to identify themselves, but demand my social security number. I only know it was them and not some scam (well, not that they aren't part of the scam we call free market medicine anyway) because they didn't spoof their caller ID.
I truly don't get the mindset of people who hire call centers to behave this way. Amazingly stuff like that isn't always a scam. Just some cocaine snorting master of the universe who thinks that the same high-pressure tactics will work over the phone and demands that the call center providing the staffing go against every best practice.
Then they always complain about the bill being too high and the low closing rate, which always leads to the psychological abuse bullying game about how stupid and incompetent and uneducated the operators are and how inept management is for giving them jobs. Dipshits.
Working in a call center was probably the only thing that could have turned me from a hard-core free market into a leftist socialist. Just seeing the abuse and mind games from the masters of the universe made me physically ill some days.